17 | FARGAS
The hospital corridor seemed to stretch out forever. Sam hurried along it, a slightly crumpled box of Hershey’s Miniatures clutched tightly in his hand.
The corridor was almost deserted except for an old man in pajamas who was inching his way toward Sam using a chrome walking frame. Sam passed him without acknowledgment.
The room was nearly at the end of the corridor. The door was open, but an apricot-colored curtain covered the entrance. Sam stopped and checked the number on the door before entering. He pushed back the curtain slowly and peered through to double-check that he was in the right place.
The room was large enough for two people, with a central curtain to separate the two beds, although only one was occupied. The walls were white and shiny, except for some stainless-steel panels. Various bits of high-tech medical machinery jutted out from the walls. The room smelled strongly of soap and antiseptic.
Fargas lay on the second bed, closer to the window, with a plastic tube embedded in his arm. The other end of the tube ran up to a plastic bag filled with a clear fluid. He looked gaunt in the sharp light from the window. His head was shaved, although not recently, his long hair replaced by a fuzzy mat of regrowth. He had dark rings around his eyes and bruises in a circular pattern around his head.
“Where’d they drag you up from?” Fargas asked, grinning as Sam entered.
“Mom e-mailed me,” Sam said, trying not to show on his face the shock he was feeling. “I just flew in.”
He neglected to mention that it had been on a government-owned Learjet.
He held out the chocolates, and Fargas took them with a hand that twitched constantly.
“Thanks,” he said. “They gave you a get-out-of-jail pass, huh?”
“Something like that.” Sam smiled briefly.
“It’s good to see you, dude. What you been doing?”
“What have you been doing, man? What the crap is all this?”
“It’s nothing, man. Just being stupid. You know.” Fargas avoided his eyes. “Have a seat. How’s the job?”
Sam sat on a metal-framed chair with blue vinyl padding that was against the wall by the window. Sunlight hit the back of his head like a blast furnace.
“It’s …” Sam paused, then asked a little too quickly, “Job?”
“You can fool your mother with that bull about prison, but you can’t fool your best friend. So, what are you, some kind of government spy now?”
“Why do you say that?” Sam asked.
“You’re not the only one who knows how to use a computer,” Fargas said. “When you disappeared, I started prowling around the Internet. To see if I could track you down. Next thing, two heavies in black suits turn up on my doorstep telling me to cease and desist.”
“What did you do?” Sam asked with sudden concern.
“I ceased,” Fargas said. “Then I desisted. But I’m not buying into any story about prison.”
“It’s complicated,” Sam said, and this time it was he who avoided Fargas’s eyes.
“Can’t talk about it, huh? Where you living now?”
“Out west,” Sam said, and when Fargas was silent, he added, “San Jose.”
“Nice.”
“How’s school?” Sam asked.
“I gave that away. Wasn’t getting anywhere. Tell me about San Jose.”
“I’m really not supposed to say anything.”
“Not even to me?”
“No one,” Sam said.
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“I like your new haircut,” Sam said.
Fargas rubbed his head. “They reckon you get a better connection. I never noticed any difference, though.”
Another silence. The sun on the back of Sam’s head was making him feel a bit woozy, as if his brain was slowly broiling inside his skull. He moved the chair into the shade of a curtain.
“Why don’t you come over to San Jose? Hang out with me,” he said.
“You got a job, man. And what am I going to do in Jose?”
“Lot of hot chicks there.”
“Dude, I can’t get a girl to look at me here. Why do you think some pumped-up, bleach-blond, West Coast chick is gonna pucker up for me?”
“Fargas, there’s gotta be better—”
“Better?” Fargas cut him off, sitting up and leaning forward with sudden fire in his eyes. “You better than me, dude?”
“No, man.” Sam jumped to his feet, holding his hands up in front of him as if fending off an attack.
“It’s okay. I’m just playing with you.” Fargas flashed a grin and lay back down. “Of course you’re better than me. You got a job. Secret agent man. Got a fancy apartment, I bet. You got a fancy chick too?”
Sam sat back down in his chair. “Come over. Check it out for yourself,” he said.
“So I can be a dweeb loser on a different coast? Forget about it. Inside the game, I’m a king.”
Sam said nothing for a moment and just looked at Fargas. He said, “That’s not real, man.”
“Works for me,” Fargas said.
“Really?” Sam asked, and it was Fargas’s turn to be silent for a moment, staring down at the bedsheets.
“It’s exciting,” he said eventually. “I started out as a peasant and now I’m a king.”
Sam said nothing.
“I guess …,” Fargas began. “I guess it started with just an hour or so in the evening. You know, finish my homework and play a bit before bed. And then I started playing before my homework. I’d promise myself that I’d play for an hour, then do my work, but I never did. Sometimes I’d play until I fell asleep, at like three or four in the morning. So I set a time for myself. Two hours a day, max. Seven p.m. till nine p.m. But I found that between times, all I was thinking about was the game, so I might as well log on.”
Sam shook his head.
“It’s really exciting,” Fargas said again. “You’re running on adrenaline the whole time. You see this beautiful woman enter the room, and part of your brain knows that she could just as easily be a ten-year-old boy from New Jersey or some fifty-year-old guy from Australia, but you don’t really think about that. You’re wondering if she’s a princess, or a spy, or an assassin. When you log out, the real world seems flat and gray. No gorgeous women are going to walk in your door and try to kill you. There are no armies to lead on a counterattack against the neighboring kingdom. Your dad asks you to take out the trash, and you look at your stats homework that you haven’t done yet, and you just want to climb back inside.”
“You hadn’t eaten in four days,” Sam said. “You were passed out on the floor.”
Fargas said, “I’m good at this. Really good. My kingdom is strong, and my subjects respect me. In there, all your real-world problems, they just disappear. The worst thing that could happen to you is that you might die and have to start over.”
“I’ll move back. Forget the job. We’ll hang out like we used to,” Sam said.
Fargas looked him in the eye for a while, then broke the gaze. He laughed. “No, man. I’m all right. I was just blowing off steam. I kicked it. I’m not going back in again. The king is dead. Long live the next king.”
“True?”
“Yeah, man. Those games are dangerous. I can’t believe they’re still legal.”
“What are you going to do?” Sam asked.
“Got a good shot at a job with Truck-Rite. My uncle organized it. Just a store man, but someday I could end up a driver.”
“Cool. Big rigs?”
“Ten-four, good buddy,” Fargas said. “Might get a coast-to-coast and come see you after all.”
Sam thought about that for a moment. He had the feeling that it would never happen.
“No, come to San Jose,” he said in a no-arguments tone. “I know some people there. I can get you a good job.”
He wasn’t sure if that was true, but the amount he was earning, he could pay Fargas’s wages himself if he had to.
“No—”
“It’s not a suggestion,” Sam said. “You can stay where I’m staying till you get a place of your own. It’ll be cool.”
“They’re going to keep me here for a week,” Fargas said, glancing up at the IV bottle.
“As soon as you’re out, let me know,” Sam said. “I’ll organize the plane ticket.”
Fargas’s eyes wandered around the ward for a moment, then finally settled back on Sam.
“Okay,” he said, and there was a lift in his voice. “Okay, yeah, let’s do that. It’ll be cool.”
“It’ll be cool,” Sam echoed with a smile. “I’ll see you in a week or so.”